ジャイアント・ウイルスとは、まさに巨大なウイルスで、真核細胞よりも大きく、そのゲノムもHIVよりも100倍もあるような巨大なものです。
しかし、DNAポリメラーゼを有していないため、自身では自己増殖ができないのです。
このジャイアント・ウイルスには、現在4つのグループが知られているようです。これらのゲノム解析が可能となった現在、その起源と進化の解明には非常に興味の湧くところです。<参考>
The rapidly expanding universe of giant viruses: Mimivirus, Pandoravirus and Pithovirus
Guest speaker: Prof. Jean-Michel Claverie
Institute: Aix-Marseille University School of Medicine / Director, Structural and Genomic Information Laboratory / Head, Mediterranean Institute of Microbiology, France
Date: Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Location: Ibn Al Haytham (Building 2) · Level 5 · Room 5209
Abstract:
More than a century ago, the notion of "virus" was introduced to designate infectious agents invisible to the light microscope and capable of passing through "sterilizing" filters. In addition to their extremely small size, most viruses studied over the years also exhibited minimal genomes and gene contents, almost entirely relying on cell-encoded functions to multiply, as expected from absolute intracellular parasites. Unexpectedly, the last ten years have seen the discovery of 3 different families of eukaryotic "giant viruses" exhibiting gene contents and particles of cellular dimensions, thereby challenging accepted ideas about the diversity, evolution and origin of DNA viruses. Interestingly, relatives of those giant viruses might be involved in the regulation of unicellular plankton populations planet-wide.
Bio:
Jean-Michel Claverie is professor of Genomics and Bioinformatics at the School of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University, director of the Mediterranean Institute of Microbiology, and head and co-founder in 1996 (with Dr. Chantal Abergel) of the Structural and Genomic Information Laboratory, a unit of the French National Research Center (CNRS).
He got his initial training both in biochemistry, computer science and theoretical particle physics (!?) at the University of Paris, France, and combined his multidisciplinary education into a Doctorate (Dr. Sc.) on the subject of mathematical modeling of biological system in 1977. He then successively hold research positions at the Jacques Monod Institute (CNRS) in Paris, then at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, before creating in 1982 one of the first pre-Internet era computational biology laboratory at the Pasteur Institute (Paris) where he remained until 1990. He then returned to the USA, for the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI, NLM-NIH, Bethesda) where he participated to the exciting beginning of the Genomic era, as a NIH senior Fogarty scientist, until 1995. Before returning to France, he spent one year as director of bioinformatics at Incyte pharmaceuticals (Palo Alto).
During his career, Jean-Michel Claverie worked on a large variety of topics ranging from the mathematical modeling of ultracentrifugation experiments, microbial and human genetics, cellular immunology, and more recently microbial genomics. Following the discovery and initial characterization of Mimivirus, the first "giant" virus in 2003, he then focused on the search for more giant and/or unconventional viruses in increasingly exotic environments. In the last ten years, his laboratory described three new families encompassing the largest known viruses in terms of particle and genome sizes: the Megaviruses, the Pandoraviruses, and Pithovirus, the later revived from 30,000 year-old Siberian permafrost. While continuously searching for more exotic viruses, his laboratory is now increasingly involved in deciphering the biology and evolutionary origin of these giant viruses. The laboratory’s approaches include structural, molecular, and cellular biology, high throughput
genome and transcriptome sequencing, environmental sampling, large-scale comparative genomics and metagenomics, and the development of relevant bioinformatic methods for sequence analysis and data mining.
Dr. Jean-Michel Claverie co-authored more than 200 scientific publications, as well as the best-seller book "Bioinformatics for Dummies". He was a member of the Board of reviewing editors for Science for 10 years (2002-2012) and a recipient of the CNRS Silver medal in 2004.
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